In something of a Blues Brothers moment the band is back together. There will be at least one more CPMA release with further bug releases likely. Please post any CPMA bugs here and we will look in to it. Major features are unlikely to be added so no feature requests unless it's small.

The CPM gameplay is mature but can be tweaked if the community wants it to be. Let me stress the community wanting it part, nothing is going to be pushed on you and a large majority of the community would need to want something to change for it to change. If the community wants something tested we can add a CPM dev gameplay to 1.49 which will let you test any changes. It will still contain the current CPM gameplay as well. If you'd like us to look at or discuss any gameplay issues please post here.

I'm not sure what's going on with promode.org, I have no idea who owns it so we'll use this thread for the moment. A forum may be sorted at some point.

very small request:
put in a timer direction cvar like ql has, so its user preference as to whether the game clock counts up or down :x So annoying playing the odd game of cpm, and having my gameclock go down instead of up!

6 months into learning quake everyone in ql pretty much forced me to relearn the memorizations with the clock going up not down as its "what everyone used" even tho i had an easier time subtracting tbh. Now cause ql died i'm supposed to remap my brain again cause of a lack of cvar lol.. tired of this shit who really cares what direction my damn clock is going? it has no advantage or changes anything at all..

my blatant fanboyism that has developed for this mod makes me have feelings of despair when something that i've always viewed as something that makes the game feel unique and play different than the other version of quakes is going to be changed.

i love the fact that people have to make the adjustment from ql to cpm by subtracting, and i even moreso enjoy the despair when they realize that they can't use the timer as a crutch in duel.

uhh, i love the duel system in cpm. I also liked subtracting more than adding.. Like I said first 6 months of learning quake I was subtracting in quakelive.. then I got into clans and everyone made me switch to going up. I just hate fucking switching back and forth, theres no advantage either way, its strictly preference. Subtracting is not harder than adding and adding isnt harder than subtracting... i just don't get it

If you support cpm, you should not be against adding this feature. It would not change the gameplay of cpm. The only thing it would do is make the switch to cpm more comfortable for a lot of other quake players. It's ridiculous that any cpm advocate would be against that.

I think they want to keep it pure and with one singular philosophy. I think QW kind of adds a lot of config hacking required in order to play at high levels. CPM, in my opinion, tries to put the impetus more on the player than on constantly adding cvars to allow players to squeeze out ever last advantage.

Although the clock is a very, very, very minor example. I think it's the philosophy of CPM/CPMA to be as pure and leveled as possible.

Adding an option to change the timer direction does not mean more "config hacking" would be required to play your best. Neither way works better than the other, it's purely about personal preference, and what someone is used to playing with.

no, not really. I was just wondering why it would be so bad. I wouldn't use it, but that doesn't mean someone else wouldn't benefit from it. meh, no point going on with this anymore. It's a moot issue imo.

This has been discussed before in many places and the answer remains no. A standard needs to exist and it happens to be count down. The standard could be changed but we would never support having both because it would be a horrible mess in pickup games. Yes, people could use 'blah in 10 seconds' binds but they don't just use that.

lol, are you serious?
having a feature for people who need it doesn't make the default any less standard. why are you making a decision for those who want to count up? if they get confused by others binds, it's their prerogative to change

"Because all the real CPM players will be counting down, whereas all the QL newbies will be counting up, and it will get even more confusing."

"real CPM players"? lol, is there a scale for realness? is it measured in hours played or maybe number of elitist forum posts? can one be any more shallow and elitist about a stupid game?
what the hell is so confusing about having having a choice? 'even more confusing' compared to what?

"Having it count down all the time makes the QL nubcakes have to adjust, and after 10 seconds, the confusion is gone."

what makes you think 'ql nubcakes' will be able to adjust after 10 seconds? why should *anyone* be forced to adjust on something completely arbitrary?

anyway, none of this has to do with my actual question, which i will repeat:
why is someone denying users a choice that the users can make for themselves? is promode for ADD idiots who can't be expected to agree to use consistent binds?

Consistency of what, anal retentiveness about arbitrary shit? Too bad that consistency and "ease of use" are in conflict. What would be consistent is being able to use the same clock when switching from game to game without having to get used to something for no reason other than authoritative pricks making stupid decision. And no, I'm not missing the point, it is obviously "promode is about forcing arbitrary shit on you". No one is going to be confused, no one is going to be "forced". There is simply no downside besides a few unsatisfied sadist elitists like you to making this an option.

It probably isn't, but I've lost hope in pretty much everyone who plays QL, and so act accordingly.

Plus I really don't care much about the clock. I don't know why I was being such a dick about it; probably because I lacked sleep. Both sides make sense to me, but I would prefer if it stayed as it is. Wouldn't mind if CPMA had cg_leveltimerdirection, though.

Uh what? No, "forced because of others" is actually "making a choice", and it worked perfectly.

#3 is an example of how not having it as an option in CPMA doesn't work because he is forced to change because he has no choice, which is why he made the post!

Also, funny how "the need for a standard" doesn't go away in QL? Why are you implying it will suddenly go away in CPMA? All that's gonna happen is people are going to use what they want, maybe based on what they play most. OOh the horror.

why dont u give it some more thought? the only reason he had to make the switch in ql from counting down to counting up was BECAUSE ql had both as options in the first place. so the issue is really the fact that ql has an option to count up which everyone uses since q3 (osp i guess?) counted up and cpm happens to have a timer that counts down for reasons that were discussed in a lot of other threads. i dont think ql having a different system is a valid reason to change the cpm system.

also afaik higgs is the only one who even feels like this is an issue. generalizing that one off occurance to stating that the direction of the clock is a deterrent to cpm attracting new players is a jump thats so stupid it isnt even funny.

Consistency over customization. This has been discussed so many times elsewhere... When does a feature become an obstacle? When does the player's wishes overrule the importance of the design brief? When will people stop asking the team to change stuff rather than just learn to adapt? And why change things for a historically fickle group of players, that will likely just move on again soon anyway?

You have to draw the line somewhere. If you’re prepared to overcome all those other, more impacting deterrents to participate in the mod that I listed before, is the clock really, truly, going to matter? I think not. Hence the question, is it the most challenging deterrent you’ll face.

Only it does have a downside - you can't have a situation where one half of the team is calling one time, and the other half of the team is calling the other. Public games happen - adding this feature will fuck them up royally.

Is that really so difficult to understand? In CPM, people have autoexec's that call precise times, not randomly spam 'Quad in 10' because a 1 second error means the difference between a swoop steal and getting the pup cleanly.

Wow really, in CPM? Ookey. So I have played and used the binds in both CPM and OSP, and they are useful, what does this have to do with anything?

You're saying people should not have a choice because they will somehow choose different clocks. That is bollox. The fact that they even know to consider binds implies they are going to know to communicate in a way that they understand the fucking communications. What the fuck, seriously?

Follow the logic. Public play requires the same level of co-ordination that clan play does, only it involves people from different subsets working together. If they're all from different backgrounds, and you allow differing timing conventions, are they going to quietly degree ahead of a map which timing convention to use? Like fuck they are. Most of the time you have to sweat blood to get players to agree on their positions. They will, however, all agree on one thing. Getting Quad and RA is important. Ergo circumventing the potential for communication issues to arise breeds the likelihood of communication occurring, which in turn builds a team play ethic, because everyone in Quake, and I mean everyone, gets off on winning.

Allow an artificial barrier to stand in the way of that communication culture growing, and everyone will continue to remain silent and work for their own benefit foremost, than for the good of the team. And clan play is sourced from public play, as that’s where the amateurs meet, and teams form.

Basic gameplay mechanic. Singing off the same hymn sheet makes co-ordination easier. If the game is going to maintain the ethic of 'the best team always wins,' then effective communication should be a pre-requsite, not an option.

"If they're all from different backgrounds, and you allow differing timing conventions, are they going to quietly degree ahead of a map which timing convention to use? Like fuck they are."

Yes, of course they are. And they have. And they hardly ever haven't. It will happen only once, when the player understands what the standard is. For gods sake, they manage to agree to use a third party voicechat service like mumble already, somehow. I have experience in this since netquake, and something tells me you're speaking totally out of your ass. The rest follows a faulty premise.
Lastly, if I choose to ignore the binds and time on my own, it's my choice, I'm not going to be "confused" because of it.

Yeah, like in ql, the day they added cg_leveltimerdirection all pub team games and pickups drowned in utter chaos and team play came to a grinding halt. Same in QW, Q4 and so on. Only CPM still has a strong pub team game community because of timer direction consistency. lol.

First, you ask all the abstract questions without giving the answers applicable to this particular case. If you did, you will find that this request is a non-issue, and no single line actually exists in a system of multiple diverse components that are entirely separable.

"If you’re prepared to overcome all those other, more impacting deterrents to participate in the mod that I listed before, is the clock really, truly, going to matter? I think not."

First of all, what you think can not be thought because it's based on a false logical premise. Games FPS rule-set exists in parallel with games GUI. In this case, this is evident because playing a new game implies the player is already prepared to learn new FPS system and learning it is the core gaming experience, ie it's enjoyable and rewarding. Now, the clocks direction is purely presentational and doesn't have anything to do with the gaming aspect, and therefore is a deterrent of a different kind which is not justified in it's existence and which the player might not deem even worth overcoming in order to experience the core game.

"Hence the question, is it the most challenging deterrent you’ll face."

Which brings up another question, why is this even the question? IF there are multiple deterrents, some more or less challenging, why the hell would you just dismiss the least challenging ones? Especially if they are really *easy to address?

Yes, I get your point. Only the ease with which it can be addressed is being massively overstated. It's not that simple, since it's not just a point of personal preference - it impacts your ability to communicate effectively with your team, and CPM is all about working as a unit in TDM/CTF/NTF. Ergo - changing it for personal preference is a bad idea, since a game will feature many, many more public matches before clan matches can occur.

So in a mod containing ramp jumps, double jumps, bunny hopping and altered weapon specifications, you're suggesting the clock counting in the opposite direction is the biggest barrier to adaptation? Uh huh...

Of the things you mentioned it honestly IS the biggest barrier to adaptation for me. Everyone should be expecting some major game play differences when changing to a new game / mod, but setting conflicts like this are just annoying.

why dont u give it some more thought? the only reason he had to make the switch in cpma from counting down to counting up was BECAUSE cpma had no options in the first place. so the issue is really the fact that cpma has no option to count up which everyone uses since q3 (osp i guess?) counted up and cpm happens to have a timer that counts down for reasons that were discussed in a lot of other threads. i dont think cpma having a different system is a valid reason to change the ql system.

first off im not asking anything to be changed in ql. im fine with either system. i just feel having the option is unnecessary. second, lets go back to the person who asked for this. quoting from one of his posts

"I don't understand why anyone would have an issue with this?

6 months into learning quake everyone in ql pretty much forced me to relearn the memorizations with the clock going up not down as its "what everyone used" even tho i had an easier time subtracting tbh. Now cause ql died i'm supposed to remap my brain again cause of a lack of cvar lol.. tired of this shit who really cares what direction my damn clock is going? it has no advantage or changes anything at all.. "

this is why i said he ran into an issue in ql because ql had the option to change clock direction. if it hadnt then we would just be talking about why cpms clock direction is different from ql/vq3/osp whatever.

and lastly, the reason given for picking downwards over upwards (or atleast one of the reasons), is that the timelimits are different for each mode so to maintain consistency, its always easier to think of how much time there is left in the game as opposed to having to keep track of which mode you're playing in order to keep track of how far along the game is or more importantly how close the game is to finishing.

given the fact that theres really no practical difference in being able to add or subtract (atleast for most people i know), this i think is a perfectly valid reason for picking downwards.

ps: when ninemil said that having both options will result in people calling times in the 2 separate systems causing confusion, no he wasnt making unsubstantiated claims. read higgs' post again. when ql first introduced the system, back when we had actual pickup ctf games in na, almost every game would have someone who needed to be told to switch the direction to upwards so that the times called out on voice comms were consistent.

Can you imagine a bunch of newbies trying to cope with 1200 UPS swoops on cp9 when they can't even agree which fucking second they're supposed to hit the spawn point for? :p They'd rage quit CPM forever after one game of minky running loops.

The only problem is having to change from something that you're used to. When people decide to play in a team and communicate, they pick something everyone understands, including the types of binds they're gonna use, and many other things. Having to be told to pick something that everyone is using is a small cost prerequisite to communicating, and it happens regardless of what is being picked. If there is a standard, that standard creates expectations as well, and it works even in QL, where they actually changed the standard, which is the root of that problem. But anyway, it is actually a small cost to pay in comparison to the benefit of being able for an entire team to transition to a game and having a choice in timer direction or a player trying out pickup where no one uses any binds to begin with.

As higgs said, I've not once seen someone call out a specific time in a cpm pickup. So to me it's not an issue.

One solution to this though, would be to make a setting that when enabled, puts both an upward, and downward counting clock on the hud. You would just need to make both of them fairly small so it would not take up too much space.

Forcing countdown is like saying that you have to measure someone's height starting at their head and going down instead of their feet and going up. You reach the same value either way and whatever minor discrepancies pop up in the middle will never cause a problem in pickups (everyone just uses X SOON binds) or in organized cups because teammates should know what setting their partners use anyway.

Also, warsow has cvar for the movement system. You have people playing together perfectly well even though they might be using a different fucking movement system. I think CPM players can handle a little freedom of choice here.

cause its my personal preference, especially after having to relearn it once already. And I don't play in pickups so don't worry about that, would be for the odd game of cpm playing with QL friends, all of whom would no doubt appreciate the cvar as well..

The demo seeking is not really possible without a significant reworking of the game. Quake3 demos (all of them) are forward only - MME gets around this (afaik) by rewriting the demos in a format that DOES allow seeking.

It might not seem it, but this is a major feature - otherwise we would have implemented it years ago.

the most notorious bug I remember atm is the specbug which I think is a cnq3 bug(I think it happens on cnq3 servers): sometimes when waiting in the queue to play you get thrown out of it and can't cycle through players' povs unless you do /reconnect or 2x/speconly, which ofcourse puts you in the back of the line

I'd like to try teleports which keep your vector of speed and/or crouchsliding and projectiles through teleports ala q4

I'm afraid the answer to the teleporter thing is going to be no because of technical reasons. AKA: getting the normal of the teleporter plane from the game is a PITA, that in the case it even has one (cillyinder teleporter models don't). It just can't be done with the current teleporter entities and changing them would require to modify the maps.

If this is the final update then the only thing I could ask for is the release of the cpma source code so the community can keep expanding on the game itself. I know this is something quite a few people have talked about over the years.

Some netcode cvars require a standard to achieve consistent behavior across the server and the players. Laghax and xerp cvars should most likely be removed. There is either a best setting for these commands, or there is a setting which every player should use to prevent weird multiplayer behavior (laghax 1, xerp 0).

maxpackets and nudge make sense as they need to be used on a per connection basis.

No different to vQ3 on a clean LAN connect... xerp was added to make things like GGL viable, and it did that job well. Now with less high-ping games being played due to smaller, fragmented community groups concentrating their matches around local geological locations, xerp is showing a negative effect. That's not to say the guys in India, China, and other isolated regions don't make good use of it. I've played some pretty fun games on Indian servers lately.

1 and -1 are two different code trees. One is ids, one is ours. The reworking was done because it made sense to at the time, given the volume of trans-atlantic games being played.

cg_xerpClients <-1|0|1> (default = 0)
A replacement for id's cg_smoothclients that does something useful. :)
1 - Hacked extrapolation: intended for HPBs
This smooths players out when you use high timenudges, at the cost of
some accuracy. It's typically easier to hit a smooth target that's a few
pixels misplaced than it is to hit one that looks like it's teleporting
all over the map, so this combined with cg_nudge is the best option for
HPBs.
0 - No extrapolation. Fine you're LPB.
1 - id's smoothclients: fine if you have cg_nudge 0, worthless otherwise.
Note that prediction errors, such as players in walls, are likely to
occur. Tends to increase how much other players warp to you.
Use at your own risk.

Xerp is what makes cg_nudge useful; which subsequently made playing overseas, so to speak, possible.

If you remove it, I'll personally send a brigade of cocksmiths to make a tuna puree out of you, unless you got some other way of maintaining that awesome projectile detection/registry offered by the combination of those two without fueling the whine of others.

I'm tired of stressing the convenience it has to offer to high-pingers who for some reason deny it or simply ignore it. And to this day, that's the only reason i prefer cpma netcode over anything else.

laghax -1, xerp on preference, nudge only for latency above 100ms, otherwise you're decreasing the rendering accuracy for no gain. See the post I made below, or the many others knocking around the net, including here, as to how each variable works.

Avoid cg_nudge unless you absolutely must use it - you're not doing yourself any real favours with laghax already in the game.

I guess i'll have to let this video back up my given suggestion to anon. I've been playing with the suggested settings since 2008 as if I'd play on lan with 0 latency. Nudge sure makes models jittery/warpy but the shots still do register just fine. I've tested a lot of combinations and for the life of me, Laghax -1, xerp 1, nudge -x works best for any given ping up to ~140.

Under 100ms, you're making your client do more work for the same result, with added judder. Over 100ms, you're only actually getting a benefit from 100ms less nudge than you're setting, again, with added judder. That's not to say you're not getting *something* out of it, potentially with some perceivable gains to your projectile leads, but that will come at a cost. How strong a hitscan player are you?

Because in a combat situation such as rocket - rocket - rail, or rocket - shotgun, you'll be going from one extreme set of settings, to another, and the client has to adjust everything on the fly. Ergo, asking how your hitscan game is, is particularly relevant.

I've always been a mediocre lg player, but pretty confident with the rest, regardless of net settings. In my and a couple of other peoples' cases, with the aforementioned settings, the client has no problem at all adjusting "on the fly" and we do hit as we normally would.

As I've said, regardless of net settings I've always had a mediocre lg. And yes, for hitscan i just use xerp, although having it on 1 or 0 for lg does not make much of a difference to me because I'm still.. mediocre with it.

In any case you should've understood by now that I do not feel limited in any way with those settings.

There's no misunderstanding here Stew. One shunts everything, the other normalizes its display, giving you very different applications depending on whether your latency is high, or inconsistant and lossy. Since both scenarios are possible, this is why both variables exist.

Removing one because a subset of players are perceived as 'abusing' it then creates the problem of who matters most - the group of tangible, generally low ping players we can see and hear from, or the (sometimes much larger) group of players out in other parts of the world that still play on copper and dodgy fibre-optic. 'Pro'mode - the base concept dictates that under any circumstance, 'the better player must win,' not the player with the better ping, so removing xerp reverses the changes that allowed that to be the case for the hpb vs lpb situation.

Remember rat vs aph? Who were you cheering for then? Removing variables like xerp doesn't end at keeping european players happy. There is likely a much better solution to just pulling it.

Rat did his thing with neither, the majority play sub 100 ping, we played wansanity with just laghax no xerp it was fine. IMO it removed the need to use tactics in TDM and people just ffa aim whore now

Remember the same arguments in the OSP community ten years ago when pings started falling and frame rates became more consistent? Now, is the problem the netcode, or the hitscan imbalance? You've played Q2 recently, surely. What happens in that now?

Same problem. Projectiles lose their emphasis to hitscan, and everyone runs around mindlessly popping clutch rails and hosing people with lg. Fucking with weapon balance is not a clever idea, mind, but that's the root of the problem, not the netcode. It was only less of a problem before, because aim was limited by connection grade.

Removing xerp returns to a degree of 'soup' in the netcode for current era lpb's, sure, but at what cost, and with what gain. It's not like the ability to hit 60% rail 40% is limited to a certain group of lpbs, is it? So which is the better solution? Again, surely there has to be a better solution than just ripping the code out - it went in for a reason, and in many situations, that reason is still valid. arQ may be able to limit it to certain latency groups - after all, laghax already adapts to your latency continuously.

Yeah but people stating its to help HPB but it was made to help people who use timenudge to smooth out the warping but idk it doessnt work that way it just makes hitscans stronger, both lg and rg are nerfed compared to vq3 so weapon balance isnt the issue.

laghax does a sort of adaptive timenuding based on your ping, xerp does its thing no matter what your ping is, this is the problem imo

xerp is for lossy and inconsistent player latency - it works by extrapolating a smoother path for objects on the screen, to reduce inconsistencies generated by poor data transfer to your client.

laghax is for offsetting mid-range latency to give a closer-to-lan feel, and works by releasing data to the client earlier than the id model, whilst shunting everything automatically up to a maximum of 100ms.

nudge is for worst case scenario, when 100ms of automatic correction just isn't enough. It is used to manually shunt everything for each millisecond over 100ms that you experience. It turns to soup around the 250ms mark.

Just for the sake of clarity, and because misinformation is a bitch, I'll make a point of highlighting something you said, as it could easily be misinterpreted as fact. xerp does not alter damage values for the weapons - it merely extrapolates a smooth path for objects on your screen, to avoid inconsistencies caused by your connection. One reason this may 'aid' low ping players inadvertently could be down to the effect this smoothing will have on feints. The smoothing may reduce the visibility of another player’s feint, therefore reducing the human urge to lead the feint and therefore miss the shot after the player has dodged back in the other direction. As mentioned above, that so called ‘abuse’ is very easily fixed by setting a minimum latency threshold for xerp to function.

See my post explaining the difference between each command. It would depend greatly on the consistency of your connection, and the weapon you're using. For hitscan, the game functions pretty well without xerp, up to around 60-80ms. After that, it's a lottery of maxpackets, fibre/copper reliability, and the state of the server. For projectiles, personally I consider xerp a 'really bad idea,' and have seen people play on anything up to 110ms without it, and still rocket like a badass, but that's down to individual ability, and not everyone is rat from nobles.

I find it hard to agree with leaving xerp as an open cvar, when it's clearly being abused by many sub 100 ping non-nudge users.

I also feel that xerp adds a layer of inaccuracy to the entire game that is unnecessary and harmful. I've been told several times over the years that xerp is a clientside command, yet I'm able to feel a tangible difference when playing someone who has xerp on or off, while my xerp is set to 0. The telling factor is in the transition between their movements. A player strafing back and forth who has xerp on appears to skip the changes in acceleration between the strafes. So they will be going left at max speed, then instantly be going right at max speed, the changes in acceleration having been skipped on my screen. This is deceiving and typically on amphi I LG ~5-10% less against a player who has xerp on.

My personal preference would be xerp 0, max nudge -20, laghax -1. I played for years as a high skill dueler and team player with 80-150 ping, xerp 0 and nudge -20. I can't see a benefit for players to use super high nudge values where the stuttering becomes unplayable and they need xerp. Why wouldn't you just cap nudge at -20.

That being said, I don't care all that much about which settings are used so long as they are consistent, if I have to readjust to using xerp, OKAY. I just want everyone to be in the same boat.

The xerp argument is a difficult one because there is an extremely small number of people who actually understand the networking model in Q3 - let alone CPMA. I will admit that I am not one of those who understands much at all, but I have been working with someone who does.

Internally, we have hacked together a build that actually showed the player when other clients were being 'xerped' and the effect is significantly less than people seem to realize. Player states only differ between xerp 0/1 for about 100ms every 2 or 3 seconds - the rest of the time it makes no difference.

It is also entirely a client-side, visual effect. There are no situations where the same shot would hit with xerp on but NOT hit with xerp off - the only way it can effect hits is by encouraging the player to aim slightly away from where they may have otherwise.

It really is a rather insignificant little cvar that has become somehow notorious. The real problem is likely the same that has faced every Quake game as it has gotten older - as hardware and connections improve drastically, so do players accuracies. This leads to weapons becoming somewhat overpowered as the amount of hits increases.

Sadly the pm bugzilla and the pm.org forums have disappeared and I don't suppose anyone has a proper backup.

At the top of the head what I recall lacked the most were promode flagmodels + cg_flagColor + cg_enemyFlagColor. And perhaps simplemodel for flags.
It's rather ironic that the most important items in ctf/ntf (flags) have the worst visibility. Add the fact that flags are likely to be dropped all over the place, and the desperate lack of visibility becomes even
more apparent.

Not relative to core gameplay, but at some point Qrealka gave the bots the ability to aim out of their arseholes. I remember there being some discussion relative to their habit of freezing, and if I'm correct, something was removed to fix this. Either way, around that time the bots went from aiming similar to a human being, (in terms of lining up shots) to being able to plink-rail randomly in any direction, regardless of having LOS at the time, destroying the illusion that they can't really see you through walls, (which we know they can.) It'd be nice to return to the 1.46 feel, as 1.47/8 is a real turn off for new players that practice with the AI.

Would it be a good idea or possible to use sv_fps 40 without a huge overhead? How was that done in QL anyway? I mean if you force sv_fps 40 online with a baseq3/osp server, the netcode just craps itself, but I never tried with cpma tbh, wonder if anyone did.

We removed pmove because it was broken, massively, horribly broken. And because it was broken, it broke many, many other things. arQ eventually grew tired of coding around that sloppiness and removed it altogether. Sadly, the comparison wouldn't be valid. I'd also debate just how much benefit you're getting out of sv_fps 125, and how much is perceived. Certainly, you're caning the sever CPU with that many cycles.

Defrag is a whole nother world. pmove_msec is banned, and never used, but the equivalent in sv_fps is used. sv_fps 125 is how it's run, and it runs perfectly. I don't know the interal workings and all that, but online and offline sv_fps 125 is used and enforced.

I'm getting tired so don't want to go into this. I just want to get back to Tales of Symphonia :/

Indeed - always did love the concept. Had a lot of fun with Mirror's Edge when that was released, and desperately wanted a sequel with multi-player free-running, rather than against the clock. One can only hope, I guess.

For me, defrag is the best mod for many reasons, one of which is that it's the exact same game online or offline, but playing online has the added benefit of being able to compete with other people (ofc, I was top100 at best, and most active players are so much better than me that there was no chance of beating them... but I still raced with arca, glm, kiddy, etc. from time to time :DD), and have your times saved and ranked and all that.

I was experimenting with high sv_fps values on my OSP server a long time ago, and even 40 were laggy like hell, so that's why I asked how was it down in QL, because, tbh, that's really feels nice.
I don't know why I never tried it with my cpma server, or perhaps I did a long time ago, just the result was so horrible I forgot the whole experiment:D

sv_fps 125 is even too much for a lan game, it would make things much worse.

...And you guys wonder why people like myself (who have had q3+cpma sitting on the HD for years) don't want to play it? If you can't even add an option to change the timer, simply because a handful of crybabies want to feel special and elite...well then, what other basic features are lacking simply due to a few elitist pricks? Probably a lot.

Looks like it's QL until the end of time. And not because of the timer issue but because of the piss-poor attitude of a few "cool" guys who play mod that no one plays . You couldn't cut it in QL and now when there could potentially be an influx of new blood into CPMA you turn them away. A+ job right there

Or until they turn the servers off because they're not making enough money to maintain it anymore - whichever happens first, huh?

Why do external playerbases always obsess so with changing particular aspects of cpm, rather than bothering to learn it the way the rest of us had to? You don't see go-karters calling for changes to the tour de France because they don't like the way it's done, do you?

Promode was always about aspiration, personal development, and promoting the better player over the weaker one. For that to happen, you need consistency, definition, and a ruleset under which player development can thrive. If everything is a variable, this becomes impossible, and while in this case, the impact is less serious, the question comes of where do you draw the line with customization vs definition, and sadly, your personal preference in this case is not the only factor to take into consideration.

The CPMA-ified movement feels pretty horrid, both vq3 and cpm modes. Some tweaking there would be appreciated.
Note that I am not just raging because some jumps areharder / impossible or anything, I don't mind having to strafe more accurately. It just feels rotten compared to baseq3 or defrag, like swimming through mud, or driving on nearly flat tires.

Speaking of defrag, you should implement the GazBug plasma boost technique. It is just ridiculously fun.

As for bugfixes, the bots are pretty useless for anything but duel, due to lags (even on a beastly machine) and general instability. Using the default q3 bots for team modes isn't really a fix, they don't strafe or think.

Also, I could never figure out a combination of netsettings that allowed me to hit what I aim at. Maybe I just don't understand them well enough or maybe the advice I got from other players was intentionally false, but I tried to get it playable and failed. Having to guess where to aim isn't all that fun. Maybe LG is supposed to do next to no damage with a perfect lock, maybe the rail is supposed to pass harmlessly through enemies, maybe projectiles are supposed to be nearly unuseable, I don't know, but it feels wrong and reminds me of CS. :(

Agreed. The artificial feel of cpma was one of the biggest turnoffs people felt, especially coming from something as smooth as osp. Granted, cpma's netcode was considerably better, but that didn't mean shit if playing the game was less enjoyable due to muddy movement.

this surprises me a lot, personally I have always felt the movement in CPM to be feel really responsive and clean. I guess I should go install defrag again, it's been a while. I agree that CPMA vq3 feels pretty bad though. I will write back here once I've played some defrag again <3

defrag uses the ancient promode code from osp or the pre-pmove-removed cpma(??? not sure which).
it's a bit faster, but it's also a BIT easier. i only miss it because some cool jumps arent possible anymore, but tbh, it's not that big of a deal.

Why? Duel is the purest form of CPM - good players can pretty much account for every major item on a map, regardless of whether they took it last time or not. How would it promote individual player development if the team were to remove the need for you to learn that skill? Map control should be about more than just looking at a number.

Map control is about being in the right place, at the right time, whilst maintaining maximum visible control of territory. Ergo, having a number to tell you where to be when is a piss poor excuse for a lack of mental timing. If after god knows how many years you can't time by feel, then you have no place in the upper echelons of the game. Given the mod’s entire concept hinges on ‘the better player always winning,’ then it makes no sense to reduce the impact of that skill just to give poorer players an ‘I win’ button.

Timing and especially remembering and position!!! on several items on the second requires way more attention than doing it by feeling and I'm a guy who does the latter one more often than not because I tend to forget item timings when I'm playing a decent player. I mean timing the items itself isn't the problem but to avoid simultaneous item spawns and to take position on more than one item requires a lot of skill. There are only a few players who are able to do so but there are plenty who do timing by feeling.

Don't get me wrong I would have really loved to play cpm as it prolly suits me more than ql but to say "hen it makes no sense to reduce the impact of that skill just to give poorer players an ‘I win’ button" is utter bullshit.

I think you misunderstood me or I just expressed myself purely (as usual :P). I'm not demanding a clock in cpm I was just picking up your argumentation. Cpm focuses on different skill sets and I like it. I just disagree with your argument :P.

Btw. Cypher's item timing isn't the best and yet he still is one of the best players ever.

*shrugs* Personal preference is personal preference. If I had my way, the digital clock would be removed from TDM and CTF altogether, meaning teams would actually have to pay attention to power-ups, rather than just have one player tap a time into their autoexec each time their hear the global call. Thankfully for everyone else, my preferences have always been largely ignored ;)

You should give CPM a go. The tiered armor system adds a good bit of nuance. You cannot pick up a YA when you have 150 armor. It sounds simplistic, but it adds an element of strategy to controlling the map and also can be used for mind games. QL/VQ3 armor system doesn't promote risk/reward decisions for changing armor pickups other than general armor delays. You can use armor pickup sequence to play some mind games or improve the chances to retain map control depending upon opponent position or weapon ownership.

Well tbh, I have some years of experience, and I can pretty much predict a spawn of two items down to 1 second accuracy (at least I do with predicting PU and mega in QL warmup when there is no timer available), but timing 4-5 items with heavy chaotic battles without a timer?
Even if I have a lucky clue about all the items (that's very rare already!) I miss things by more than 4-5 seconds for sure, which is pretty much fatal in quake?

Zotac cups, Dreamhack, etc.. all these tournaments where I see pro players lose timing even when they have timer in QL.
I'm confused now because if they can't do it, how am I (the noob with the 10 hours/week pub playtime) supposed to do it?

When did we make the presumption that 100% timing should be easy, or normal? Sometimes you see the best from a player when their timing breaks down, and they have to regain it. Is it wrong that losing an encounter may also come with the chance of losing your timing too? CPM does provide the player with a much wider range of toolset than other forms of the game, after all.

No, you misunderstood me. I'm not arguing with you about whether the timer should be implemented or not. I was just curious if it's possible to time 4-5 things only by feel, because I did not really remember people timing that much items in QW in the early years (when I was following the QW scene).

Muddier player perception back then, but yeah - there were some that could. Differing levels of expectation tho. 100% timing should be a goal, not a norm, imo, ensuring that all disciplines are a necessity, not just one.

i can tell you it is, and that i did that for years, which gives a huge advantage. I'm not sure how i worked it out, some items would spawn based on patterns you'd run, other times you can calculate when an item is spawned depending on what other items is spawning nearby(that you know you already took :p).

I'm not talking timing to the second(though within 3-4 secs), but for example keeping track of mega(spawntime based on your own health), 50h, both yellow armors, red armor and even lg and rl on cpm3a was very much possible just by using some of the upper techniques, and remembering which order you grabbed things as well.

I've heard a lot of tales from old school qw players that there were many individuals who would just get a clock and put it next to their monitor. Eventually because of stuff like that, the people developing I guess it would have been fuhquake, felt forced to put in a timer. Now the timer has helped refine the game dramatically and 4v4 in the modern era (last 7-9years) has become a lot cleaner. It also creates an environment that's much easier for newer players as it creates an easy objective that they can aspire to.

Timing in qw 4v4 has become a crazily important team based affair. Your entire team has to juggle times between one another as the game is extremely dynamic. There are no 'positions' that one can occupy regardless of much else, there are just 'situations' and the player has to react given the information he gets from his perspective and his teams perspective to make optimal decisions. The same of all team based modes. But in qw there is a huge amount MORE information that your team must selectively relay and deal with in priority. Without timing, our already imperfect knowledge as a player would become even more imperfect, this in turn makes decision making more ambiguous, making the game play less refined.

Using qw 4v4 as a case-study in this matter, I would posit that it has added depth as well as the chance for greater refinement and more accessibility.

I don't mind playing with or without a clock, but I have to disagree with you on a few points.

Before QL, I always timed by feel. When QL came out I worked a lot on learning how to use the clock to my advantage early on.

Getting good at using the clock is not that difficult, but compared to learning to time by feel it is. Timing by feel requires much less focus. Even for people that have not played that much quake, it's not that hard to predict when a 25 second item is going to spawn within a 4 second margin of error.

Using the clock takes a lot more getting used to. You need to be able to calculate the time (often while in the middle of a fight), keep the number in your head, calculate the time of another item that has a different spawn time, keep that number in your head as well as the first number, remember which number belongs to each item, and repeat this process many times without making errors, while also thinking about everything else that is happening in the game.

The numbers do not tell you what you should do either. How you decide to use the timings to your advantage comes down to your own abilities in the game. The same applies to having a mental feel for the timing.

Whether or not you have a clock on your screen, it all comes down to how you use what you know to your advantage.

Sorry, what? You're telling me basic numeration is more challenging that abstract mental timing? Perhaps for the younger generations, lol, but maths is not particularly difficult. Particularly when half the people playing the game have an autoexec that does the majority of the work for them.

This coming from arguably the best coach ever in cpm lol. You used to handle times for our entire team in TDM. I'm still not sure how you did that, because frankly I couldn't remember times for myself. You have some sort special ability for math AND chaotic situations. Unless you were writing down numbers =)

Do miss those days. Miss winding up nobles and leto, and fucking the poles over on 18r in Jolt :p Six years on, and CPM is still the only game on my HDD permanently. Just wish I had the crazy aim you fuckers always did :p

I have to say I don't agree that it's harder at all to have no timer. Nor do I think it's actually beneficial to the game play personally. I may be a horrible person to argue about this because I've played so much cpm and vq3 over the years but here's my theory:

Let's look at this in terms of sub-conscious vs conscious thought.

Sub-conscious thought is something that occurs frequently when we do something we've done hundreds of times. It's the basketball player who shoots the 3-pointer, it's the flick mid-air rocket as the player ascends the jump pads etc, It's when you hit the zone, It's when you instinctively act because of the past experiences you gained in practice and the matches prior. It's what we use when we deal with situations which do not require conscious thought, because conscious thought is slow and sluggish. So then, it's turning up by feel, that's what feel is, it's like a learned intuition garnered from many hours of playing.

There is a reason why many players don't bother to time items, but instead to run them in patterns or turn up by feel. It's because switching yourself from the conscious state to the sub-conscious state repeatedly in and out can dramatically effect performance. It's much more comfortable to not have to quickly calculate some numbers.

Players who have ever questioned their game-plan mid-game know what I'm talking about. As soon as you start losing and your confidence wanes, you question what you are doing wrong and how you can fix it. This behaviour makes you play a lot worse as you enter a more conscious decision making state, because the game is too fast and the interactions that occur work best on the fast subconscious level.

All you have to do to get better at 'turning up by feel' is to play a shit load. Being a player of cpm and vq3 I can tell you in which game item management is easier and it's not QL because of item timing with a game clock.

Instead what you do is you make a sacrifice to achieve a more accurate time. It's something that takes a lot longer to get good at. It also has an effect on decision making that adds a layer to the game which you may or may not want to include as a designer, but I do think that it can only ADD something, never take away, personally.

I can definitely support the lack of a timer as a design decision as I think it works fine in cpm 1v1 due to a variety of factors, but if you put it in QL it would be horrible.

I only said this to see what the replies would be (not a troll post), honestly I don't really care since I won't be playing CPM a lot.

Regardless, when I did play, it still was frustrating to deal with no seconds on the timer.

The way I see it, there's two ways to time. By doing the math, and by feel. Both have advantages and disadvantages. People may argue one is better than the other, but in any other Quake you could make a choice.

So why is timing by feel the "proper" way? It's just one way. If you had math nerds developing this game you might see the numbers there, and the community arguing that timing by feel isn't accurate.

You can't just alienate a valid form of playing. If I want to do the work and time it to the second and be more exact, I should be able to. It's how I get to the item and what I do in between that constitutes a play style, not the way you time an item. Doesn't matter how you time it, it's about what you do to get it, and how.

All I ever see argued with the timing matter is elitist bullshit. I always just see a giant flood of "time it OUR way", which no offense, is how the CPMA development feels. Remember thinshaft removal? All I ever seen with CPMA development is "like it or deal with it", even NOW I see the same thing with suggestions and replies above.

i find timing to the second makes me dive more, because i know that if i dive onto the spawn, i'll have the item. timing by feel may be as accurate, but it will never give me the same certainty as knowing the second and watching the clock. this for me, makes timing by clock superior (in a game where you can see the seconds on the clock).

in cpm duel tho, i like that players have to know the timings by feel, it just feels right for the game.

Maybe he doesnt but its easy to time most of the items in cpm due to the small maps, just base around an item you took, you take ya the enemy takes ra 5s after, you take the other ya after that, you now have a nice sequence of when the items will spawn

This is starting to sound a bit circlejerk-like because that isn't actually realistic or possible in the way that you stated. Item timing without a clock is something that you can quantify, but no-one has stated anything beyond 'feel' so that as well makes me question the understanding that goes on here, it feels more like a romantic interpretation of cpm from the die-hard cpm players.

If you mean back when rl knockback randomly lifted you into the air with no direct reason for doing so, I don't think an explanation of why that was fixed is required? While it was fun, it promoted pointless spam and poorly grouped aim.

In practice the new accurate knockback doesn't work nearly as well. A rocket to the face now pushes you to the floor, this may be correct, but it feels absurd. The classic rocket knockback rarely put you in the air with 0 momentum, however, with direct rockets to the feet popping you nearly straight up, this is a frequent occurrence. It leads to unjustified swings in damage and makes it even harder to attack.

Yea. When cpm first started the 3 main weapons and movement were all "equally unbalanced", which allowed for a wider variety of effective styles. Players like devious, daler, etc, could get by having a primary gun besides rl. LG and rail were both weakened, and rl knockback was changed, causing the remaining effective style to be rl + movement. I'm not saying cpm should go back to promode classic, but in my opinion the changes were overdone.

As long as you're not on some really retarded fibre-optic, the default settings for netcode should be fine. The rest of the config is layout, binds, and personal preferences. Learning the movement is important to your game tho, and makes as much of a difference as accurate timing, map control, and raw aim. And that doesn't just mean learning to bunny hop. Proper movement is the combination of the entire toolset, relative to the geometry around you. Truly talented players such as rat and Vo0 remained unpredictable at all times.

Xerpclients 1, cg_nudge -[half avg ping], cg_truelightning 0.8 to 0.95 on preference... If you have problems hitting with these settings, you have problems aiming in general.

Also, as far as timer cvars and other options... Add them. CPM is a dead/dying game, it doesn't hurt the community to add something as simple as changing timer direction.

I understand the point of creating as much consistency as possible in pickups, but pickups are pickups for a reason. Fun games you play without the need to practice intense strategies or follow certain orders from coaches and whatnot. People are right, nobody times, and if they do they certainly don't let their team know it. What is the point in locking something like this if something this minor is preventing people from playing?

In all fairness, gelleh, going back five years, you'd have been one of the first people to oppose changing any aspect of the game purely for accessibility reasons. Let's not forget the endless debates over rail damage and UPS cap.

Either way - CPM has been dead/dying at many, many points within its history, and the team have never compromised then. Why should they start now? Making a game the best it can be is not about winning a popularity contest. If enough QL players whine about bunny hop, should it be removed to level the playing field? Where do you draw the line between personal preference, and design-based consistency?

Bringing up that I was against changes 5 years ago (in fact we're probably going back at least 8 years ago) has nothing to do with my opinion on the matter now, especially when we are talking changes of a timers direction versus changes in direct gameplay, like UPS/drag and rail damage. I would expect you'd be a bit smarter in understanding the distinction.

My point is that a timer wouldn't constitute a direct gameplay change. Someone having a timer that counts up isn't going to be faster, do more damage or have a direct impact on the raw gameplay. It is simply a preference. And if preference over something so minor to the impact of the overall game is what is keeping people from playing then I would be all for it to help bring players in.

Oh, I understand the distinction gelleh - I was just highlighting what a change in character it constitutes. You can't code for the zeitgeist if it will adversely affect the future requirements of the game, (working under the presumption that there's growth as a result of change,) and you can't have a situation where everyone in a public team is calling different times. Which means either the clock ticks up, or ticks down, not a choice of both. And retcon'ing the entire established player base for a few fickle passers-through is certainly not something the gelleh that raped europe as part of leto would have agreed to. He’d have told everyone to fuck off, and with style at that. (Probably as part of a Pez movie, no doubt :p)

*shrugs* Whatever, andy. I get your point - but that was never under debate.

Yeah, I would've told people to fuck off, rape euro pickups while some of the best players were on the opposing team, and take numbers. I'd also duel the best players on both sides of the pond, and very often win.

That was all fun times, but being around the gaming scene for many years now has shown me a few things. One of those is that sometimes you have to cater to the "fickle" players in order to still be able to play the game you enjoy. I'd much prefer a CPM where I don't play the same 7 people every game that don't give me timings, as opposed to a CPM where I DO play with the same 7 people every game.... That don't give me timings.

Being around the FPS scene since '96 has taught me one thing - chasing the fickle only winds you up fucked over, particularly when you start counting heads too often. Wind the clock back three years Andy - why are we in this mess, anyway?

Sure - I miss those days too, but I'll be the first to write them off if dev go chasing after id's scraps. We never have done in the past, and the game is no worse off now than it was just before Swelt and I released cpmctf1 and 2. In perspective, the timer really isn't that big a deal. If no one is calling times anyway, let them fucking learn it the way the rest of us had to. What we need now is content, and to address long broken and incomplete game modes, such as CTF and NTF. That should be our priority, not slotting crap in to keep people that will only move on in six months happy. You know damn well what kind of response most of these people will give after a few games against someone like you or Nath.

An example why it isn't completely perfect yet is because of all those warpy 50-60 pinged players from you-know-where.
It seems like CPM has some built-in assistance for higher pinged players; it's much easier to hit rails when your ping is 50, and you also take less damage from enemy LG. I normally ping around 8-24 but i'd much rather trade my fiberglass connection for some pol... i mean warpy internet connection :)

THIS. no cripple effect on the lg to account for the advantage xerp does with hitscan. all the damage values from ql and somehow speed up the movement. either ground friction like in cq3 or some other solution...

Merging CPMA with QL was a nice idea and many people supported this on the QL forums, but we all know this will never happen :) The CPMA dev team should focus on working together with the guys from www.fraglove.com, they have something similar to QL and it features CPM movement. Also comes with an installer, perfect for people who don't know how to install CPMA. Capiche?

It used to be pretty illegal, since there was a QL map conversion available, and required, to play on the servers. That was modding the QL assets, which was a breach of the ToS.

Then there was a free download of pak0.pk3, which is against whatever the hell rules are in place for Q3. I'm not sure if pak0.pk3 is still available for download there, but stahlaal has removed the QL mappack, so it should be completely legit now.

can we explore the possibility of making the powerup spawn sounds non global? its pretty stupid that a team that has no control of the powerup area still gets to time it based on the sound. i mean i remember playing defense on cp9 and keeping track of all 3 powerups from my flag room. thats just ridiculous imo.

Really?, so how do you decide who is gonna hear the PU sounds? only who is in the same vis-leaf with the PU, or same vis+the surrounding leafs (that's already more than a "small feature request" imo)? Or just by distance, because that's can be stupid on certain maps?
That would only add nothing but one more required sentence into the team-chat communication (e.g: "they took quad/" or "nme regen spawned"), and more coding for the devs ofc.

That's why I asked if it's only by distance, because we had some test with that a long time ago, and it was just an additional team-chat, nothing else.
But it wouldn't be much work so they could add it as a server option:)

sorry didnt really understand. what i thought was trying out powerup sound behaviour just like any other item sound behaviour like armors, where only players within a certain radius (with occlusion or whatever u call it) would hear it spawn.

cant see how this would be a lot of work. and unless its been tried before i dont see why we shouldnt try it out. i mean u do see the gameplay aspect of it right?

I was thinking about your idea a little bit, and perhaps they could add a sv_whatever cvar.
"0" would mean the PU sounds how it is now,
"1" would mean that only the team picking up the PU could hear the sound globally, and it would be just a normal sound for the other team, like picking up RA or any other item.

well that just boils down to saying the sound is fucked on the quake 3 engine therefore we make pu sounds global. how is this any different for armors then? or any other items?

and imo it does make a big difference. no its not the same as just having one teammate use one extra bind. u have to be in the vicinity of the pu pickup to see/hear it in the first place. and no matter how broken the sound is it should still add to the team play aspect.

dunno if ur saying this was actually thoroughly tested and the decision was based on that. certainly not the case since i started cpm which admittedly was quite late (2007). if it was tested i guess ill have to be happy with that.

PU went from being local to global around 2004, after 4 ish years of using the OSP/vq3 system. It's been that way since, and this is the first time I think I've seen someone ask to have it changed back.

The discussions for it went deeper than 'the sound is broken, do we fix the sound, or just move to global?' - it was keyed around the playerbase's approach to powerups, the increasing involvement of coaches, map design, and a number of other factors. As usual, the change was made permanent after numerous beta builds. Hope that helps.

i fail to see how any of the factors u mentioned couldve possibly led to a decision to leave it at global. in fact i dont see a single good reason why it should be global in the first place. honestly why would u want powerup sounds global when other items arent? but anyway i guess it isnt a big issue for anyone else so it isnt important (not that that has stopped the dev team from making changes in the past).

i would like to suggest fixing the bfg to have a small splash like it had in a few pmx tests. also a swinging hook as promised to mew would be nice. in terms of ntf it needs an option for having spawn delays. good to see something happening :-)

Since sv_fps 40 was supported in 1.48, I wondered why it would be limited to using CNQ3 as the server. Is it possible to allow sv_fps 40 with ioq3 or other builds? Only about 1/4 of the current CPMA servers are hosted on CNQ3.

yes, but since the weapon switch time is instant, there's no reason to run around with the wrong weapon out (in a sense the "wrong weapon out" like in OSP does not exist anymore).
If someone decides to have a noisy weapon out he's stupid anyway and doesn't fit into CPM l33t circles:P

On a side note, less sounds to play for the engine -> less dropped sounds.

set rockfire "weapon 5; wait 2; +attack"
set rockswitch "-attack; weapon 6" // Switches to LG, set the number to the appropriate weapon you wish to switch to afterwards: 3=shotgun, 4=grenade launcher, 5=rocket launcher, 6=lightning gun, 7=rail gun, 8=plasma gun, 9=BFG10K, 1 & 2 will not work as they have weapon delay

Also I'll mess around with VSTR some more to get a zoom in LG. :D
EDIT: ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM

CPMA 1337 Crew: Hi there! We would like your input on bugs that need fixing and perhaps some small features!

Community: [insert anything]

CPMA 1337 Crew: YOU IDIOT SCUM THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN LEARN THE GAME THE WAY IT IS JUST AS WE THE REAL GAMERS HAD TO

Good old CPMA community. Oh well, they have a point. If you need to change something to be able to handle it you better code your own mod, just as they had to make theirs when they couldn't handle QW.

CPM's not even bad but the spokesnerds are hilarious.

Adding an OPTION for the timer to count up like, oh, everything else ever wouldn't have more advantages than disadvantages? Literally fighting against that is about as arbitrarily retarded as not making it count up to begin with...

I don't even personally care about that though; fellow anon said it perfectly already.

not because of the timer issue but because of the piss-poor attitude of a few "cool" guys who play mod that no one plays [...] now when there could potentially be an influx of new blood into CPMA you turn them away. A+ job right there

in my year and a half+ of off/on cpm'ing, i've seen HUNDREDS of different players join the irc channel and add for the games. 95% of them never seem to come back. the once constant influx of new players that has been gradually slowing down in the cpm community never retained a "bunch" of players for very long. if every one of them had stuck with it, it'd be more active than ql in the us atm. you cannot tell me that because of

not because of the timer issue but because of the piss-poor attitude of a few "cool" guys who play mod that no one plays [...] now when there could potentially be an influx of new blood into CPMA you turn them away. A+ job right there

is the SOLE reasoning behind that. you just can't. the community has not been the "nicest" to new players (myself included), but unless you get really butthurt about some people in a video game telling you you're bad (which you are, if you're relatively new to cpm)...

so why do people leave? is it the timer direction (lol)? is it the community (nothing anyone with some skin can deal with)? what oh what could it be? please enlighten me since you appear to know more about it than anyone else in this thread.

kinda wanted to reply to this post since it started all this - omg timer is causing newbs to leave - business.

its pretty hard to quantify anything here, but i would say that you're not considering some key aspects. firstly lots of people try lots of games. most of them dont stick with the games for long. this is i think a general phenomenon, not specific to cpm. ive had quite a few friends try cpm after playing ql. a lot of them just didnt like the gameplay. some found it too fast and didnt want to bother learning it. quite a few just couldnt be bothered because they just didnt like the gameplay enough to overcome the other problems - the biggest of which is that the community (in which i include myself) is stagnant.

i started the game late (2007) but even as late as that there was significant community involvement. we had pickup/draft tournaments, nations cups, duel tournaments. not very often but enough to keep some interest going. the pickups themselves were active with a larger more active user base. so you werent stuck talking to the same people over and over and arguing the same old shit.

so what happened? dunno really. seemed to have been a massive outflux of players. some lost to ql. some just lost interest and moved on to other things.

i guess what im saying is that, as is usually the case, it's really a combination of factors. out of which i think the dev team is probably the smallest. (that last part is purely subjective reasoning on my part tho).

not because of the timer issue but because of the piss-poor attitude of a few "cool" guys who play mod that no one plays [...] now when there could potentially be an influx of new blood into CPMA you turn them away. A+ job right there

so if we just said "ye sure we'll add that" and didn't, people would still flock?

I don't care about the timer. I was arguing over his post. He said that it's not about the timer, but about our attitudes(even though ninemil was very polite in explaining the reasons that go against that addition) and after that he immediately says that we're turning an influx of players away by NOT changing the timer.

I don't care about the timer because it's not a deal breaker - if you can adjust to aircontrol, fastswitch and doublejumps you can adjust to a timer counting down. So yeah, it could be changed in order to cater to a few guys but the scene wouldn't grow since the same guys would find bigger problems than timing down the road.

you are not qualified to predict the future, and neither is the ninemil. stop thinking for the newbies, and start listening to them. the attitude of forcing shit on people for no fucking reason to purposefully make the introduction to cpm as painful as possible is obviously the wrong thing to do, regardless of what other problems are

lol, yeah, i know you're mentally handicapped and don't understand causality. what i don't understand is why there are people like you with actual control over the mod. i wish they would fuck off so it has a fucking living chance.
ps.
if this is still not obvious, you cant have hardcore community without newbies

Ah, so you'd rather that cpma be considered hardcore competitive not thanks to its high level of gameplay inherent to a large playerbase and a game with no skill ceiling, but due to intended obscurity.

Newbies don't use the clock to begin with, so they would learn the clock the same way that people do in VQ3/QL - just a different direction.

The only people who could possibly make use of this are the people coming over from Q3/QL who already have some skill. In their case, if they say that they would not play the game because of the timer, they likely wouldn't play the game anyway.

...is absolutely fucking retarded. it's just one factor out of many, but a factor nonetheless. (promode.org being down is a bigger factor, for example.) Vedic is a clinical case, but how the hell have you managed to accomplish anything while being so stubborn and not learning from mistakes?

It's not a factor. For someone to say that they want to go out of their way to learn an entirely new armor/movement system, new maps, new weapon/ammo values, and then to draw the line at the direction of a timer (that is functionally useless for the purpose they want in duel anyway) is retarded.

Such a change would be for a minority of players considering CPM (players who refuse to play simply because of the timer), who already are the minority of Q3/QL players (players who play at a high enough level to even use the timer).

Go out of the way? Draw lines? What? Do you know a factor is? It means it factors into the overall decision making. The player is a bit less likely to pay the game, for example, he is interested and attracted to CPM movement but is missing the items and keeps dying, therefore he makes a split decision one evening to play QL. But this is basic fucking logic, so if I have to explain it, I'm talking to an imbecile disconnected from logic at birth. Fuck off.

Who is "a bit less likely"? You? A player who isn't timing items in CPM isn't going to be timing items in QL. This is only a factor to experienced QL/Q3 players, that are also conservative enough to be an idiot about the clock, but not conservative enough to be opposed to all the other major changes.

You're talking about a couple of players, at most - and that's a generous estimate.

have you looked at cpm from a distance ? there's no competition left. even if cpma started to "cater to newbies" now, it wouldn't catch on. it's too late for cpm. unless you like to pretend cpm22 is a good map and shoot 360 flick rails at bulgarians all day, cpm is pretty desolate.

you are not qualified to predict the future, and neither is the ninemil. stop thinking for the newbies, and start listening to them. the attitude of forcing shit on people for no fucking reason to purposefully make the introduction to [ESR] as painful as possible is obviously the wrong thing to do, regardless of what other problems are (c) Demiurge, ESR Head Admin

welcome to [cpma], where uninformed cry-babies meet reality full of cynical men doing what they want. press ctrl+f4 if you don't like it on the internet. contact a suicide hotline if you don't like it elsewhere. (c) Demiurge, ESR Head Admin

uh everything? what does a game have to do with a website? this is fucked up on so many levels, because not only these situations are totally different, the intent of both actions I'm talking about is exactly the same, which is attracting newbies.

that's completely irrelevant and beside the point, which is that both have communities that are having things forced upon them by their rightful owners, one of which you preach against and another you preach for.

....holy shit. is THAT the analogy? ...do you realize that means I can't ever be so hypocritical as to kill a mosquito, because that would be forcing shit on a community? it's bloody obvious I'm arguing the rationale behind the decision to not have both way timer, which is non-existent, not the rights of the 'respective owners to make decisions'. the validity of the rational behind censorship is also bloody obvious as it is practiced every waking moment, everywhere.

it's the dev teams game, they can do what they want with it. you criticising about it despite the fact that, for whatever reason, they choose not to implement that idea, is no different to me criticising about not having the option to unnuke comments to read just out of curiosity, since i believe that would increase the new user base since it would accomodate to both people who dont want to read nuked comments and those who do. obviously you would intially nuke it but with an opt-in option i and any other new user would be able to read nuked comments if we wanted to.

i'm also arguing behind the rationale of censorship. the rationale behind not having a two way timer could be that the cpma dev team don't want to accomodate for people who can't count down and that, in their minds, there needs to be a universal system of timing which, having a two way timer, they consider to counter this approach.

and the intent of your action to keep esr under control is met with the result that you're driving potential people away from this site who would enjoy reading comments that were going to be nuked anyway. whilst my idea of having an opt-in option would accomodate for everyone.

"and the intent of your action to keep esr under control is met with the result that you're driving potential people away from this site who would enjoy reading comments that were going to be nuked anyway. whilst my idea of having an opt-in option would accomodate for everyone."

holy fucking shit? THAT'S THE IDEA. if you want to read those comments, GO AWAY.

actually the analogy is pretty clear altho since ur on the other side of the argument in this thread u dont seem to get it.

it has always been abundantly clear that the dev team (rightly imo) considers people who whine about things like the clock idiots. theyre just a little more polite (with the exception of arqon) about letting you know that you are in fact an idiot.

ive seen very few genuine newbs turned away from the game because of minor details like the clock. lets face it most newbs dont time. period.

i think folks are confusing the general unfriendliness of the community to newbs with the dev teams attitude. those are 2 separate issues altogether.

no, its not clear. no, I'm not on any other side because there is no other side because its NOT THE SAME ARGUMENT.

your point that developers laugh at people who whine (make this a big deal) is irrelevant.
your point that few "genuine newbs" are turned away by minor details is irrelevant.
your point about the attitudes of the dev team is interesting but also irrelevant.

the clock direction has nothing to do with the game. no one is claiming this is a singular reason for someone dropping the game. the entire argument on my end is that there is simply an advantage to having this option and no disadvantage. all disadvantages brought up are hypothetical and baseless.

ur just repeating yourself. saying it isnt the same argument over and over doesnt make it so. ur problem with the dev team "forcing shit" on people is the same way some other people feel about the esr admins nuking/deleting comments which some of them might want to see. im not commenting on whether either is justified or whether either matters in the context of attracting/keeping players/viewers. i just see the analogy and i think most people do.

back to the issue at hand, you seem to redefine the context of the argument as it pleases you. either you think the clock is relevant to the game or you dont. if you dont, then you shouldnt care which way it goes at all. Anyway I've pretty much said all I wanted to say on the clock. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

The one thing I do have to say is that it's amusing how aggravated people get about something that I've seen very very few people make use of. I've found that most people who give reasons like the clock and other similar commands as things they dont like about cpm are mostly people who've already made up their minds about how bad cpm is and are just looking for debating points. o wells.

1. stfu
2. yes, i play cpm, and no, i don't "really give a shit", i "kind of give a shit", and you have no fucking point telling me what i give a shit about, regardless of how miner of a shit i give about it
3. stfu

Seriously? If that's the only other option you see I can't help you (perhaps suggest taking a break from doing flickshots on hub and leave the basement for a bit though). Jesus christ you people... Keep it coming, don't mind "my point" (which you unsurprisingly missed) being reinforced. Better than nothing since you're clearly incapable of questioning yourselves, at least.

rofl @ the quake4 suggestions. Yes, let's add projectiles through teles and crouchsliding since q4 was such a success and not a total clusterfuck of a game. Nope.

Christ, this isn't difficult:
-remove xerp/smoothclients
-add timer direction adjustments
-add an irc interface option to the menu ("connect to irc now!")
-add ability to change the color of the lg beam
-add ability to use aliases EXACTLY like QW
-add the ability to get a colored crosshair when you get a hit, like quakelive (stupid, yes, but it will attract noobs)
-add tutorial vids to the menu ("New to cpm? Check out these videos for tips!")
-improve demo playback functionality
-fix the fps bug when using bots (same as the pervious option; it'll get new players in since they'll want to run around with bots to try shit out first)

Sorry, but the reason why Q4 failed has NOTHING to do with the things you mentioned. Crouchslide was one of the things that actually made Q4 interesting. The reason why it failed was because of the shitty engine, bad community and lack of interest from the whole eSport scene. CPM would only benefit from options like these, because you add more depth to the game, and the attacking player would have more advantages over the camping player. Also, the whole philosophy behind CPM is taking all the good parts from the Quake series (QW's movement, Q2's jumps, Q4's crouchslide) and taking out the bad parts. The rest of your idea's sound good, and i hope the dev team will pick them up since it sounds quite easy to add.

Not a chance crouch sliding would be implemented in CPM. It's a bad feature allowing players to attack players far faster and also completely silent, how's that good? CPM already has silent walk and run with the trade off being that you go much faster jumping (making sound)

talking about bundles... cpma and defrag together with all the media replaced so its free. i would play this till the rest of my life. i still kinda dont understand why cpma didnt finish the media replacement project. in all these years of q3 by now there is so much created by the community, weapon models, player models... i think if the team would reach out a bit more it could be done very fast and with quality results.

Yeah, and i believe they are allowed to borrow stuff from the OpenArena dev team, that would surely speed things up in terms of making a second attempt at PMX. I don't really care about the textures anyway since i play picmip 8, heck, you might as well replace them with solid colours ala Warsow. Looks nice too.

1) I've noticed that screenshots of CTFS are never done. Maybe others gametypes are in this situation.

2) That could be interesting to allow players and spec on online matches to retrieve the xml stat file and not only the hosting server.

3) Warning ! Pointless point ! A handball based game type could be very fun... or not.
I mean per example BFG and GL for shooting the ball, RL for rj (no damages, just propulsion for team and enemy team), and players could intercept the ball just by touching it. That's a way to have a movement based game, different from CTF/NTF and CTFS, and a "new breathe" in the community.

But i guess that kind of new feature needs a lot of time and is not really useful.

4) Try to bring back to life promode website, but that's not your job, sure. I guess the CPMA community needs a main website with servers browsing, news, stats etc. A merge of all the websites currently working like QL does, without oblige to have an account, but use most of the features. That's attractive and convenient.
Minky's website for #cpmpickup is a good start : http://www.cpmpickup.eu/ .
With some voluntaries, that's doable.

most of its in Q43A, along with alot of other stuff, and aload of stuff not other mod can or will ever have without id adding it to the engine

Q43A all the recoding for new features n recode in general is so good, it dont need no antilag and so on and so on, and all the new netcode and yeah, snapshot code n shit like client prediction not being overwritten client side by a snapshot and break the barriers and have 128 players on a Q4 server with vehicles n turrets and voice taunts and 100% custom models, and liquid and lava

"Our own personal enthusiasm for CPMA is what lead to us contracting arQon to work on Quake Live for such a long time during the beta period, and we could have continued to work with him if he had not vanished (and his whereabouts are still unknown, hopefully where ever he is he is safe and alive). The fact is, CPMA exists and any true CPM/CPMA fan probably would not be satisfied with anything less than the real deal -- which they already have to play. Most fear that a CPMA integration would segregate their community.

Concerning the mod, we've already added many of the fixes and features present in CPMA, from its fps independent fix, to competition commands like its 'timeout' ability, client customization like its colored bright skins, or its projectile smoke controls; gameplay changes like fast weapon switching, double jumping, ramp jumping...

While there is was a lot done within the CPMA framework, I would say that the two big remaining things would be the CPM air control physics and server-side demo aka MVD support. The CPM air control is just a concept based on how movement functioned in QuakeWorld, but I wouldn't personally be interested in any level of implementation that falls short of providing the exact feel that CPM fans are looking for. While cooperation with some existing CPMA coders may be possible, the legal owner of the CPMA code is missing making any cooperation between the two teams difficult if not impossible.

I think real fans of CPMA would rather just play CPMA, but if there are fans of Quake Live that would like to see further CPMA features in QL, it would do them a greater service if they specified what from CPMA they'd like to see."

Ok. This post leaves me with a few questions...

1) If arQon is still missing and his whereabouts are unknown, how can he be working on CPM 1.49? If not, what was ix implying then with 'The band is back together'?

2) SyncError states that CPM (air control) could have been implemented if the CPM owners had contacted them. If it was this easy, why hasn't this been done yet? Surely when arQon is missing, someone else of the CPM dev team could have taken this responsibility?

3) There's a slight sense of hope in this post concerning CPMA implementation, perhaps 1.49 CAN be merged with QL if SyncError is contacted by whoever is left of the dev team and qualified to do so?

Don't get me wrong, i'm not accusing the CPM dev team of not taking any action, i just like to know the story behind this...

1. "The group" could be everyone -arQon, or it could be that he might be coming back, or any number of things.

2 and 3. But Sync said so himself that anything less than CPMA is complete and utter shit, at least so long as CPMA is fucking concerned. Why go on to talk about how it could have been done if the CPMA devs agreed? Nobody wants a butchered, bastardized version of CPMA in QL. It would be an abomination and nobody in their right mind would play it.

I'm sure the CPMA dev team did take no action, on purpose, because this is, and always has been, a shit idea. The only "good" way CPMQL could be done is if the CPMA devs licensed the Q3 source and resources, then just put it in a browser like that. 1.49 integrated into QL would be complete and utter shit. Shit shit shit shit shit shit. Shitty shit on a shit-caked shit-cake.

Long story short, I had acute health problems that became chronic. I've only been in a position to even think about Doing Stuff very recently, and getting life under control again hasn't been easy.

(Apparently the promode.org mailserver also dropped off the face of the earth around the same time I did. I wouldn't have seen any emails anyway, but you can't blame id/Sync for the lack of communication).

FYI, qrealka's been in charge of CPMA development for at least a couple of years now, and I don't expect to be involved with a 1.49 release in any way, unless he asks for my help with some piece of it.
"The team" isn't just me, and it isn't just developers. I expect what ix means is that the Design Team are looking at any potential gameplay issues that might have become aggravated by time and technology.

Is there anything that explains more precisely in what consists this project ? Shall it be integrated into QL and switching gameplay like in CPMA in terminal, or in a parallel website or plug-in etc ? Then, only the physics shall be added or the entire gameplay ?

And, since it seems to be in a complicated situation (I hope you will retrieve your good health too), explain what the project lacks in order to find new voluntaries.
I would like to help too, but I guess i won't be that useful (depends on the need).

Anyway, most of us have many interrogations, that would be useful for all to find a way to communicate efficiently. (Maybe i'm wrong, in that case I apologize)

How about LAN support already? Why are you guys holding back the possilibity of going to a local netcafe and playing quake matches with your real friends in real life? This was the best thing from the golden age of Q3. You are holding back doing those gatherings with people and doing small tournaments. Just allow doing that for free ffs.

You think that standardisation of the ingame timer is important? The reason it could be are only pickups, and we've already established that noone communicates timings there.

The rest of Quake 3 (and Quake 4) was more accustomed to a counting up timer, since it seems easier for most people to add than subtract. And you know what's hilariously contradictory? That you try to eradicate the importance of timing in CPM (see duel), yet make it harder for new players from the other games by removing their ability to time. If everyone can time, its less of an issue, is it not?

It seems to me that you just want less players in your game, or you have a fear of it becoming "popular", like QL? There's really no good reason to leave out this option, that makes the game more accessible to so many more players yet doesn't make a difference to gameplay. Its hypocrisy and twisted logic like this that killed CPM. Noone can believe in a purist project like this if there are so many conflicting ideas and contradictions.

If you had read my responses a little more closely you might have picked up that I agree with
"The rest of Quake 3 (and Quake 4) was more accustomed to a counting up timer, since it seems easier for most people to add than subtract" and that standardizing to count up is my personal view on the matter. CPMA is a long running project, over a decade, with many contributors, not all of whom agree.

When CPM was designed the pool of players we were interested in were used to count down so there is no contradiction there, it's just not been changed to account for the shift in what players are used to. You were 10 years old when the mod started so it's not surprising that things have changed since then.

Any chance for adding/removing some of the maps? We talked about this regarding PMX, but I feel it should apply for cpma aswell. Maybe changing the mappool could add some much needed life into the community.
Good to see you Ix, would love to have a chat with you. Ever on irc these days? :)

ctf2's been broken since the UPS cap it was designed under was retcon'ed. It should be removed from the pak tbh, and it's still available from my website if anyone wants it specifically. There are better maps that have been made under the current design brief that could take it's place.

Yeah, something like that, I'm not sure how you want to do the visualization. It could be over on the HUD (e.g. chat line). I could imagine one use being for making notes while you make a frag video. Or to note a particularly good move and want to show someone, 'hey look at how Joe jumps to MH and tricks Jane.'

Look at soundcloud, people can make a comment on a song at a certain time e.g. "drums are awesome here"

Something about Sync saying call my desk phone made my head flood with images of Don Draper from Mad Men. And I am definitely D.T.F Don Draper. Send that phone # my way Mr. Sink error, I'll get to work on that plumbing. The things I would do to be a woman from that era. Tell me more about air control with that cigarette in your left hand, that drink in your right hand, some innovative advertising ideas grasped in your left foot, and a desk phone gracefully resting on the big toe of your right foot, and any respect for women thrown on the floor. Someone photo shop me a syncerror don draper picture for nohomo purposes, quick!

as mentioned above, xerp is really just a lg and rg booster. player styles are really determined by the use of xerp. either you count on your rockets without xerp or on your lg with xerp. and i cant for the love of god decide on what to use. really should be the same for everyone.

what i would find useful also is to have an option to be unhittable in warmup so you can just run around if you like, practice some jumps or shoot others if you want.

also an option to leave up items so its easier to learn new maps with a group of people.

Well I humbly request widescreen fov scaling or increasing the fov cap to 145 so 130 fov users in QL can play cpm like they usually would after fixing their fov settings.

or on a side note you could just use the baseq3 cap of 160.

EDIT: I forgot also I would like to request the addition of the new accel code and m_cpi code for mouse sense ( not to be confused with ioquake3s fps depandant accel code ) and QLs zoom sensitivity algorithm.

My #1 request would be the option to make the crosshair flash a color and/or pulse when you hit the enemy, as in QL.

As accustomed as the Quake community is to hitbeeps, they are just one method of feedback, which were largely a necessity only due to Q3A's lack of hit feedback in other areas. For example, UT3 uses a crosshair flash and 100% audible pain sounds; this allows you to confirm a hit without the opponent honking like a clown on a bike each time you shoot them. Halo has the shield flash and COD has that silly little x under the crosshair. Even if you go back to older games with no express method of hit feedback (i.e. Q2, QW, UT1, spotting blood spatters or hearing pain sounds is much easier everywhere else than Q3 with the hitbeep off (try it).

My point is not to slam Q3 or start a flame war between fans of different games, but simply to offer an idea for an option which would be nice to have. With all the attention that's gone into CPMA's config and HUD options, it seems like a bit of an oversight not to include at least one method of hit confirm besides Q3's idiosyncratic hit beeps.

Lastly, it'd be nice if someone would delete the mynx head from the default HUDs. It's kinda silly to force anyone who doesn't use Mynx to spend 20 minutes with the docs trying to figure out how to take this irrelevant waste of space out of the FOV, especially when the default HUDs were designed to provide alternatives to players who didn't want to screw around with hud editing.

pak.lst so you can tell the game what pk3 files to load like in ezquake

Weaponalpha ( like in ezquake )

cg_gunanimations ( like in edawn )

A nomip texture text file so you can tell the game the names for specific files not to be affected by r_picmip 2+ , so for example you can see through the holes in the mesh on tourney 2 up at YA down to rockets with picmip 5+ and simplemipmaps 0 ( simplemipmaps doesn't seem to be able to turn on in cnq3 ) and picmip 6+ with simplemipmaps.
So in this text file you would write the names of the texturefiles you didn't want affected by picmip , So for example ( I don't know the exact name of the texture ):
q3dm6centerpent.tga ( in the .nomip file or whatever )
and you would have a picmip 0 pent in the middle of dm6 with what ever other picmip setting you were using, this could also be used to make the weapons act like they do in QL and look nice at high picmip settings.

fullbright weapon models like in Q4max ( I think somebody already made these but can't remember where I've seen them )

remove the gunoffset limits on X axis and Z axis especially positive values on the Z axis and negative values and both

In QL, the game is much newer and evolving but: timing items, securing position, securing resources, helping the right areas, dropping/gear fresh spawned team-mates, quads every 2 minutes, positional awareness/understanding efficient engagements, defending positions of interest etc - it feels like I'm always doing something and even if I'm stacked I can lose it quickly if I misplay it.

In CPM when I'm playing, and when I played with plus, all we did was time RA's and Quads and abuse our superior fighting/movement skill over the opponent. We dropped weapons and sometimes played to hold positions but often we just take fights anywhere. Between power-ups it often feels like it's either too static or I'm running about just trying to get frags too much. When I get a power-up it feels like the resources I win don't mean much. It feels like duelling at times where you try to get superior stacks and then just frag people with it. There isn't a position where I'm scared that my stack is at risk if I just fight well.

I think the reasons behind this are:

1. The movement means that position is worth less which encourages a less structured game play
2. Instant weapon-switch gives an even bigger advantage to the player who is already stacked, allowing him to take fights from worse position efficiently. This means that once you have a few right weapons you can take fights in any situation, there is less danger.
3. The map design is often too open/large on the whole causing there to be less impact when you control the major areas
4. There is less incentive to help team-mates beyond giving them a weapon
5. Too much health on the majority of maps allowing for the team with the most armour to play recklessly and get away with it, instead of encouraging smart use of the armour.
6. Nothing is really that 'powerful' by itself except the Quad, and the Quad doesn't help you win anything powerful, it just gives frags and maybe control of one area.

I'll add to this list if I think of anything else that stands out in my head but, general lack of objective is my problem. It could just be that the evolution of game play has suffered from the lack of clans. I still enjoy cpm tdm but these are the things I've noticed and I thought it might be interesting to apply comparison.

Maybe you are a bit right, but I guess the problem is that most of the current cpmers are lazy to play tdm really seriously. Room, items and weapon control are still important.

In my opinion, most of the tdmers are :
- Running away to avoid to get killed once more.
- Rushing because the got killed again and lazy to play.
- Abusing their aim or their stack/pu and running alone throught the map.
That's a bit overdone, I agree.

Yes, TDM lacks of objective, because the whole game lacks of objective, none is playing it like it should be, no real teamplay.
Maybe I'm wrong, but this is my opinion, even if I'm the worst TDM player of the entire world.

And finally, do you really think a 1 minute PU would change anything ? If the Quad carrier really uses the Quad, he would get quickly out of ammo after 1 minute.

Yes, that could change the gameplay, but I don't know if it would give more objective to TDM.

To a degree, you're just echoing the flaws of CPM that as part of dev, I once echoed about the CTF modes - it's balanced and designed around duel, with bits tacked on, and those bits inevitably fail to be as good as they could be, due to development's choice to keep all things consistent across all modes, (see the removal of UPS cap and the corresponding fall of CPM CTF.)

But at the same time, this line from you sums the problem up for me.

"In CPM when I'm playing, and when I played with plus, all we did was time RA's and Quads and abuse our superior fighting/movement skill over the opponent."

You're playing the wrong people. CPM is designed from the ground up, to ensure, without pandering to accessibility at all, that the better guy, (or team) wins. You're a damn good player, and most of the guys you play with are also pretty fucking good. I'd love to see you say the same were you playing nobles during their peak TDM eta, or leto during theirs. Trust me, there is a hell of a lot more to CPM TDM than timing quads or running armours :p

the maps are mostly to blame.
there really are no great maps :/
cpm4 is the closest thing to a great map, but it too could use some changing. smaller maps that emphasize teamplay and strong cpm movement would help out tremendously(think cpm18, but smaller).

removing weapon dropping, 1000ups rocket speed, and replacing the mg with a single barrel shotgun would also help
i did tell arqon to do just that a long time ago, but he told me he wouldn't do it because it would feel too much like qw. well, he's gone, so eh, please consider it ;p
he did apply a lot of changes i asked for in a huge update tho, am interested in knowing if some of those changes have stuck around all these years.

I was thinking about that, but if you consider that most people don't use location binds that much to begin with, for example, in clan games, people will use voice communication. In pick-ups voice comm. might not have all the players in it, and those binds are rarely used. Yet, people will learn to develop a skill which it becomes clear where they should be and what they should be doing, that is, learning the game and knowing what to do. At this point, the team overlay is all that is really required. It will help the player get to this level of knowing what to do. In #uscpmpickup where there are new players to ctf it provides an intuitive way to communicate the objective of the game, thus helping to build greater structure in games and help their understanding.

Then most people are kinda dumb to be honest ( or maybe cpm doesn't have a location token ). My qw spawn/stack bind had hp/ap/gun/ammo/location for example and I try to spam it when I need to get through a place that's spammed by my teammates.

lol, good point. cpm is for hardcore gaymers of steel who don't need to be conveniently eased into it like children. obviously if you don't want to spend hours setting up your config and learning what a config is, cpm is just not for you and you need to fuck off. youknomsan.

yeah, binds are good for communication and specifically to communicate actions, like quad, but they're not an alternative for the location triangle thingy for the reasons xerosawyer described. they would be a good addition for promode.

Well yeah, most players are pretty dumb when they are new to the game or game mode, they haven't built that intelligence yet. Once you reach a competent level of play, where you have a firm grasp of what is going on, I find that the overlay does a good job at relaying this information. However, the cursors displays the same information in a more intuitive way.

why shouln't you? you can execute more complex strategies by playing against their precise movements, is it really a good skill to have, the ability to memorize swarming patterns without seeing what the teammates are actually doing?

any feature can have pros and cons. saying there exist features that have no pros doesn't answer what the cons of this are. in particular, autoaim has no pros, but actually a special learning mode that walks your through with pauses and popups that describe items would be pretty nice, it's actually similar to the QL tutorial everyone has to go through, I don't see any cons to that.

Well, as said ix, qrealka is working on it, but alone. And he's quite busy, so he needs time.

Furthermore, the next update is not only CPMA 1.49, but CNQ3 1.47 comes with, then, more work.

From what I know, you can expect the new release in the next few months (before the end of the year if everything goes well).
I'll try to join qrealka soon, maybe that could help to get it faster.

CPMA standalone is a parallel project which will, ofc, feature CPMA 1.49 and CNQ3 1.47, but with its own media content.
This project has not started yet since, as memphis said, we need another 3d modeller and I don't want to say to the possible members to start if we are not even able to really do the necessary.
If we are not able to replace the ID Software's media content, we will probably just use the Open Arena stuff. :/

TLDR: Wait a bit more, it's coming.

Btw, suggestions are still welcome, but it comes without any warranty of being taken in consideration. :P

Well, I looked at his about page, and concerning 3d modelling, he mainly did some maps and weapons models, I don't know if he is really experienced in 3D modelling since players models are quite more complicated.

And to be honest, I think this guy is twice more pretentious than what he deserves to be.
" I havent looked at quakelive's files to locate my name, but I am listed in the last part of the credits under Special Thanks because I had no team based jobs on the team."

I can't speak with that kind of people, this is beyond my capacity.
Sorry.

How about putting CNQ3 sources at GitHub ? And all of what you have already for CPMA Standalone also ? How people can contribute to this project when nobody knows about it ? How about sending some "Free portfolio job offer" to some Deviantart/other well know 3D artist sites ?

You can make alpha version with free GPL Q3 textures replacement, "Doom" model from OA and the rest of the necessary models/sounds.

playmorepromode, made by newborn, is the new Official page, giving the lastest binaries.
And eu.promode.eu is like a "central" website, designed to gather most of the information about CPMA, but not official.

Well, without CPMa going open source there won't be any progres in development ever. The times of "10 years free support by one developer" are definitely over. As for CNQ3 source code: it is already os and posted so using github should give people a chance to improve this engine.

Well, since CPMA is not yet a "final product", sharing all the source is not a smart idea. Yes it is stable, but it is better to share a solid version. Maybe the sources will be given after this last update, I don't know.

And, in my opinion, having several team working on the sources for different project is useless. Why having two different versions of CPMA at a same time ?
If some people want to improve CPMA, he can contact the team and share his willings and ideas. And here, that will be actually useful.
That's my opinion.

Carrying on the question about creating bots for "MySkill", is it possible to read log files of how well you are playing and then determine the correct skill level of bot to play against? Is this possible? Is there already an application that does this?

Possible, maybe, but probably not accurate. The main thing that could be done is that if you win easily a bot level, increase a little bit the bot level.
But imoh, there is no need for any automatism for that.

Stopped reading at the middle of the discussion, I saw tons of comments about the timer and prediction/net commands. Sorry for not having the time to read everythig, because I am in a hurry at the moment.

What this mexican wants in cpma is just new game mods:
-Better FTag, at least a good cfg
-other stupid/fun mods. Some people say yea ctfs is shit nobody plays it, or hoonymode, I dont care they are there for some reason, I might suggest bomb from wsw or cs or domination(BF and QL). People would say "go wsw, or go play cs this is cpma", I say why not?

im not sure how it has something to do with CA, it could be round based but it has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with it:

You vote a map, then you pick an spawn, the other player picks another one. This simulates the starting of a duel game, you can analyze your options at the beginning of the map: what items should you get, you guess what items your enemy is gonna get, etc...

This is like a gametype to learn how to start playing a game, simply that, picking the best option depending of the spawns given. This doesn't happen in CA, ca is all about camping the same location and rocketjumping or +backing the shit out of the map when you're last map standing, in other words, fucking retarded (in cpm is a bit funnier tho).

If the enemy team dies in the first 20 or 30 seconds, it would no more be the basic Elimination with 2 points but "Rampage" with 3 points.
That would prevent lame people to suicide on space maps to win a game.

CPM's gameplay was beyond the point at which you can make major changes like removing the RG, that would throw other things out of balance. Were I designing a new gameplay as we were with PMX then the RG would have been experimented with as a weapon far closer to a stake, without any area effect. PMX is sadly long dead after arQon repeatedly disappeared without warning, making it impossible to keep an asset creation team together.

cpm is perfect. new players just need to play maps that are not so intimidating. people gotta stop raping newbs on cpm3a and start playing new maps where the newbie can protect themselves easier and prediction isnt as important so cpm22 is also bad. pukka3tourney3 and astronomybeta are the best maps for starting the game off in.

1) removal of weapon dropping(/kill bind to drop your current weapon. that's your punishment for not having good communication. also, makes room control a lot more important)
2) quad every minute/2 mins for battle suit
(adds a bit of chaos and gives a bigger reward for good team work.
can be used by the outofcontrol team to gain back extremely important rooms(rl/ra) )
3) armor time dropped to every 20 seconds
(helps out of control teams combat the new quad timelimit. gives a bigger reward for good armor control. )
4) removal of all knockback/pushback on mg.
(no one's movement should be slowed down because of spawns.
would promote faster gameplay)
5) rocketspeed increased to 1000ups
(coupled with the removal of weapon dropping, turns the rl into the game changer that it needs to be)

the game would be faster and require more communication/teamwork. what's not to love? :P
might have to drop some maps from the current pool if those changes are made, but i'm sure we'd find replacements pretty quickly( cpm18r/cpm4a should still work)

CPM's gameplay is pretty much set in stone, there's no team to test and develop it sensibly, you'd just get half-arsed changes that knock everything else out of kilter.

Much of what you're talking about was actually already planned for the PMX gameplay that sadly didn't go anywhere when arQon disappeared.

Points 1, possibly 3, 4 but not the same way and 5 (but you've got the numbers wrong) I actually agree with but not for CPM, it would require a clean slate.

1. Open to this possibility, with the right balance of other factors such as a usable spawn weapon with enough ammo.

2. is wrong in my view, we tested this extensively in CPM, it was simply chaotic and left too little room for the team play aspect (CPM is not QW, the weapons and tactics all work differently in the two games).

3. possibly, certainly CTF requires a re-examination of how armour works, though I think CTF needs armour items to be armour regenerators rather than duel style one off pickups. There is a danger in placing armour respawn cycles in lock-step with powerups as they are in your scheme (60 seconds and 20 seconds), weapons, armours and powerups are deliberately out of sync to force choice making rather than allow ultra-efficient hoovering.

4. MG is just a disaster of a weapon. Weapon knockback is also done incorrectly in my view, the reduction of friction when under knockback is a nasty hack, that would need to be reexamined and probably removed across the board (it's better to do things in one consistent way rather than one weapon hacks. MG also has range which a spawn weapon should not have, that is a powerful ability and its power necessitates too little spawn ammo, something that really hurts newer players. QW's SG is a much, much better spawn weapon. It's not useless, it can have sufficient ammo but it's not as fundamentally broken as MG.

5. CPM rockets are 1000 UPS. Yes, I think they're better faster, as I said PMX had this though PMX's gameplay was still in a crude, pre-tweaking everything on steroids state. Tweaking naturally tends to reduce the power level, sadly with both QL and CPM this lead to balanced but over all underpowered gameplay in my view.

I know that the dev team has taken a look at QW balances and mechanics and tried to emulate some of the mechanics there. But one of the things in QW TDM that stikes me is that flooding plays an important strategic role when a team is out of control. It seems that allow rapid responses from spawners in TDM forces more emphasis on item control in TDM and so therefore, I would suggest, that spawners should get MG+SG to make them more dangerous to make control.

If you mean SG as in the SG already in CPM then no, that would be awful. It's far too powerful for spawners, the game would just be mindless cess, it would not look like the at least coordinated SG rushing in QW.

Possibly, this is a hypothetical conversation though. What's wrong with CPM TDM? Are you sure you're pointing out an issue with CPM TDM or are you possibly trying to turn it into a different game that is more to your personal preference? If you want it to be essentially QW TDM wouldn't it be better to play QW TDM for instance?

btw, my biggest want, besides removing rail, is improved bunnyhopping. bunny hopping always felt too stiff in cpm for me, i've always preferred the qw/warsow implementation. maybe you guys can get the warsow guy to help ya out since warsow is about dead now ;p
think about it.

Yes, the rail gun is a horrid weapon. And I think it's a very specific part of the movement that is broken, not the speed and agility. Bunny hopping instantly eats knockback for a wide range of angles you get hit from which prevents weapons knocking you off course as they should be able to.

I think TDM is still a bit underdeveloped comparably. DDK mentioned some issues upwards but I think it might come down to either starting players with MG *and* SG that might make map control more important. Right now, you spawn in TDM as basically dead until you get armor. Weapons seemingly come in second. Since weapons are relatively weapon in CPM (vs. QW), maybe give the standard spawner more leverage and force teams to control items more. There's more risk associated with with letting a fresh spawner get a YA or something.